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The First Amendment guarantees U.S. citizens the right to petition their government, but the government isn't exactly required to encourage those petitions. We The People allows anyone to sign up and create a petition, and if it gets enough signatures, then you'll get a public response from the White House administration. It's that simple. We The People has been around since September 2011, but yesterday Peter Welsch, the deputy director of online platforms for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, announced a new API-based version of the platform.

We The People is growing fast, and they've already raised the signature threshold a few times. Last month, the threshold went from 25,000 to 100,000 signatures. More than two million people joined in November and December alone, and they've collected more than 10 million signatures. It doesn't take as much work to get 25,000 signatures as it used to.

The API will make it easier for people to interact with government content in a meaningful way. And the petitions aren't just political fluff—they set a new standard for engagement from a White House administration. From a content perspective, the responses are meaningful, and the range in tone is surprisingly human.

An API (and hackathon) means more openness

They're releasing an API with the new version. At first it'll be a read-only API, which means developers will be able to gather petition data. Eventually, a read-write API will make it possible for organizations to host petitions and collect signatures on their own websites, without sending anyone to the White House site. They're kicking it all off with an Open Data Day hackathon at the White House, and anyone can apply.

Politics aside, I think we can all agree the the Obama administration is good at the internet. They have resources for developers, they understand how social media works, their Flickr stream is hard to beat, and they design beautiful pages like this. The President of the United States did a Reddit "Ask Me Anything." Launching an API for We The People comes as a pleasant non-surprise, since this administration has been pushing for more open data and a more digital government.

Different tones for different topics

We've all heard about the petition to build a Death Star. The official reply from Paul Shawcross, chief of the Science and Space branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, was funny ("The Administration does not support blowing up planets"). But the response did more than reveal a sense of humor we all knew this administration had—it schooled us on space! Here's an excerpt:

However, look carefully (here's how) and you'll notice something already floating in the sky -- that's no Moon, it's a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that's helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts -- American, Russian, and Canadian -- living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We've also got two robot science labs -- one wielding a laser -- roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

They took advantage of a—shall we say rare?—opportunity to educate a bunch of Star Wars fans on the government, NASA, and the international space station that's orbiting around the planet. Who knew you can spot the space station from anywhere? I didn't, but thanks to the petition response, I just signed up for email alerts from NASA.

White House assistant chef Sam Kass responded to a petition to release the recipe for the White House beer. "With public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it," the response joked. It included the recipes for both their honey ale and honey porter, along with printable PDFs.

The Death Star and beer responses were great moments, but these petitions aren't all fun and games. Gun violence is a serious subject close to the hearts of so many Americans. A petition on reducing gun violence reached the threshold soon after the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, and the White House's response had to be quick, specific, and appropriately somber. The vice president's chief of staff Bruce Reed replied with a note about the steps the administration was taking to reduce gun violence, along with a video message from President Obama specifically for the people who signed the petition. "I just wanted to take a minute today to respond and let you know we hear you," the president said in the video, before talking about his call on Congress to pass new legislation and the vice president's task force to address gun violence.

The White House even had to reply to a petition to impeach the president. The response was straightforward, restrained, and somehow respectful ("Even though this request isn't going to happen, we want you to walk away from this process with knowledge that we're doing our best to listen -- even to our harshest critics"). A petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan "for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens" got more than a 109,000 signatures. White House press secretary Jay Carney's response said you can't "let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First." I'm sure the White House staffers who worked on the reply never pictured themselves having to issue a formal response to a widely signed petition to deport a TV host. But rules are rules, and it got the signatures.

Other popular petitions have addressed immigration reform, same-sex marriage, campaign finance systems, foreclosure, and many more topics Americans care deeply about. The official responses vary in tone, length, and amount of information.

When the Obama team created We The People, they may not have thought too much about all the ridiculous and just-for-fun petitions that would reach the threshold and thus require a response (or maybe they did, and embraced it). Turns out they're dealing with a huge range of topics within these petitions, from lighthearted ones like the Death Star to urgent ones like gun violence. That means they're responding to a huge range of emotions from users, so they're constantly having to adapt their tone of voice and approach. It's a big job, especially for a government administration that has, oh, one or two other things to do.

Two-way communication

These petitions aren't necessarily changing any policies, but that's not the point. So many people feel powerless to do anything beyond voting when it comes to their government, and this system makes people feel heard. If your petition reaches the threshold, someone from the White House staff will respond—directly to your concern, and not with a canned message. Even if the answer is "no," it's nice to hear a reason other than "because I said so."

Of course there are lots of people who aren't able to participate, so this channel only has so much reach. But it gives people who are active online a chance to ask some questions that the news might not be answering for them. It's also direct feedback for the White House. Citizens are telling the administration exactly what matters to them, and that opens the door for more useful and empathetic content and communication from the government. Hopefully, the government's publishers will use that feedback to inform content beyond the We The People platform. (Gov.UK understands how that works.)

As long as We The People continues to publish sincere and relevant responses, it's a functional and engaging way for citizens to communicate with their government. We've got a long way to go, but this White House administration's openness is a leap forward for government web content.